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Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879

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Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879 Globalization, De-Industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism 1750-1879 by Rafael Dobado González (Complutense Madrid) Aurora Gómez Galvarriato (CIDE) Jeffrey G. Williamson (Harvard) June 2006 We are grateful for the excellent research assistant support supplied by David Clingingsmith, Ignacio de la Huerta, Pedro Glaser, Taylor Owings, Rodrigo Parral, and Pablo Tsutsumi. We also have benefited from help with the data, useful advice and criticism offered by Leticia Arroyo Abad, Luis Bértola, Amilcar Challu, Greg Clark, David Clingingsmith, John Coatsworth, Hector Garcia, Steve Haber, Enrique Llopis, Graciela Márquez, Gustavo Marrero, Javier Moreno, Kevin O’Rourke, Carlos Ponzio, Leandro Prados, Joan Roses, Dick Salvucci and Juan José Urquiola. Dobado is grateful to the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Williamson acknowledges with pleasure financial support from the National Science Foundation SES- 0001362 and the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 1 Abstract Like the rest of the poor periphery, Mexico had to deal with de-industrialization forces between 1750 and 1913, those critical 150 years when the economic gap between the industrial core and the primary-product-producing periphery widened to such huge dimensions. Yet, from independence to mid-century Mexico did better on this score than did most countries around the periphery. This paper explores the sources of Mexican exceptionalism with de-industrialization. It decomposes those sources into those attributable to productivity events in the core and to globalization forces connecting core to periphery, and to those attributable to domestic forces specific to Mexico. It uses a neo-Ricardian model (with non-tradable foodstuffs) to implement the decomposition, and advocates a price dual approach, and develops a new price and wage data base 1750-1878. There were three forces at work that account for Mexican exceptionalism: first, the terms of trade and Dutch disease effects were much weaker; second, Mexico maintained secular wage competitiveness with the core; and third, Mexico had the autonomy to devise effective ways to foster industry. The first appears to have been the most important. Rafael Dobado Gonzales Aurora Gómez Galvarriato Department of Economic History Division of Economics Universidad Complutense Madrid CIDE Somosaguas Campus Lomas de Sta. Fé 12010 Madrid 28223 Spain México D. F. Mexico [email protected] [email protected] Jeffrey G. Williamson Department of Economics Harvard University Cambridge MA 02138 USA and CEPR and NBER [email protected] JEL No. F1, N7, O2 2 1. Mexico and the Great De-Industrialization Debate The economic impact of the core on the periphery between 1750 and 1913 had its source in three forces. The first was a European policy movement away from anti-global mercantilism and towards pro-global free trade (Findlay and O’Rourke 2003). The second was a world-wide transport revolution that served to further integrate world commodity markets (O’Rourke and Williamson 1999: Ch. 3; Mohammed and Williamson 2004; Williamson 2006b: Chs. 2 and 3). It caused a boom in trade between core and periphery, created commodity price convergence for tradable goods between all world markets, and contributed to a rise in every country’s external terms of trade, especially in the periphery. The third came from the derived demand for industrial intermediates, like cotton, rubber and metals, which soared as manufacturing production led the way in the core. Thus, as core economies raised their industrial output shares, manufacturing output growth raced ahead of GDP growth. Rapid productivity growth lowered the cost and price of manufactures, and by so doing generated a soaring derived demand for raw materials. This event was reinforced by accelerating income per capita growth and a high income elasticity of demand for luxury consumption goods, like meat, tea, and coffee. Since industrialization was driven by unbalanced productivity advance favoring manufacturing relative to agriculture and other natural-resource based activities, the relative price of manufactures fell everywhere. The world transport revolution made it possible for the distant periphery to supply this booming demand for primary products. All three forces produced positive, powerful and sustained terms of trade shocks in the periphery, raising the relative price of primary products, and through an epoch which stretched over a century. Factor supply responses in the periphery facilitated these external demand shocks, reinforcing their comparative advantage in primary products and causing de- industrialization. 3 Eventually these three forces abated. A globalization backlash hit most of the world (except Britain, the Netherlands, and their colonies), causing a partial shift backwards to protection (Williamson 2006a). The rate of decline in real transport costs along sea lanes slowed down, approaching a late 20th century steady state (Mohammed and Williamson 2004). The rate of growth of manufacturing slowed down in the core as the transition to industrial maturity was completed. As these three forces abated, the resulting slow down in primary product demand growth was reinforced by resource-saving innovations in the industrial core, induced, in large part, by those high and rising primary product prices during the 19th century terms of trade upswing. Thus, the secular boom faded, eventually turning into a secular bust. Exactly when and where the boom turned to bust depended on export commodity specialization, but all periphery regions reached a terms of trade peak somewhere between the 1870s and World War I. This secular boom in the periphery terms of trade is illustrated well by Latin America. The region’s terms of trade underwent a steady increase from the 1810s to the early 1890s, and the improvement was especially dramatic during the first five decades. Furthermore, the increase is understated to the extent that it fails to take account of the likely quality improvement in traded manufactures relative to primary products: the quality-adjusted terms of trade in Latin America probably grew at a little more than 2.2 percent per annum between 1815-19 and 1855-59, and at a little more than 1.4 percent per annum between 1815-19 and 1890-94 (Williamson 2006b: Figure 1 and Appendix 1). This was a very big terms of trade boom, but Latin American experience was hardly unique since the increase was even bigger for Egypt, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the periphery. During the terms of trade boom, rates of technological advance and human capital accumulation were so modest in the periphery that the living standard gap between it and the core surged to levels that were vastly wider at the end of the boom than at the beginning. Whether the modest rates of technological advance and human capital accumulation in the periphery were caused by de-industrialization has, of course, been a central issue in historical debate since it all 4 started. What all scholars agree on, however, was that the terms of trade boom caused de- industrialization in the periphery through Dutch disease and other effects. This paper establishes that Mexico obeyed the same laws of motion between 1750 (just before the Bourbon reforms) and 1879 (before the economic changes of the Porfiriato began). However, the differences between Mexico and the rest of the poor periphery were sufficiently pronounced to allow us to speak of Mexican exceptionalism. The rate of de-industrialization was far less than elsewhere in the periphery, suggesting that there were local forces at work that distinguished Mexican experience from the rest. Section 2 places de-industrialization within Mexican growth experience over almost two centuries after 1700. Section 3 describes Mexican de-industrialization and industrialization over more than a century before the Porfiriato. Section 4 presents a three-sector neo-Ricardian model with two tradables (silver exportables and textile importables) and one non-tradable (corn) which makes it possible to sort out the role of external terms of trade booms and local wage competitiveness. The remainder of the paper uses the model to decompose the sources of Mexican exceptionalism with de-industrialization. It turns out that there were three forces at work: first, the terms of trade and Dutch disease effects were weak compared with the rest of the periphery (Section 5); second, Mexico maintained better wage competitiveness vis a vis the core compared with the rest of the periphery, a result determined by relative productivity performance in food production (Section 6); and third, Mexico had the autonomy – something that most of the poor periphery did not – to devise effective policies to foster industry (Section 7). The first appears to have been the most important of the three. 2. Placing Mexican De-Industrialization in the Transitional Century Before 1879 It is very important to distinguish between economy-wide productivity levels and rates of growth, on the one hand, and industrial output and employment performance, on the other. This section starts with the former before dealing with the latter. 5 Mexican Economic Growth: Bourbon Reform, Insurgencia and Lost Decades In 1765, the Spanish government endorsed the Decree of Free Trade, by which restrictions regulating commerce between Spain and Spanish America were substantially modified. A century later, the Porfiriato (1876-1910) began to open Mexico to the global economy even further. In both cases, these liberal policies were followed by economic growth. But they also contributed to a rising inequality1 which helped provoke widespread social discontent, the Insurgencia that started in 1810 and the Revolution that started in 1910. The two movements generated immense violence, and they had much to do with the ending of Spanish colonial rule in one case and the Porfiriato in the other. Debates about colonial growth have been lively, mostly because the evidence is so scarce. Still, an optimistic view is on the rise (Klein 1998; Dobado and Marrero 2001, 2005; Ponzio 2005a).
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